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 TheAuldGrump wrote:

If I remember how Andy Chambers once described GW's playtesting.... it is all done in house, with studio armies - the same armies that were shown in the battle reports.

They made no attempt to simulate what will happen when the game hits the wild hordes of beardy fans.

Which is not a good way to do playtesting at all.

It left them wondering why nobody bought the Knights of the White Wolf - after all, they were more expensive, even though they didn't work as

Back in the day, they did external playtesting. The external playtesting project was abandoned when one of the groups leaked the fifth edition rules however, but thst is another story.

Different playtesting groups throughout Ireland and the uk were given different playtest packets and reported back on thoughts an issues. Different groups would have had different versions of proposed changes etc. I know this for a fact as back in the day, some of my closest friends were part of a playtesting group in the south of Ireland (the main guy even got his name in the special thanks section of a few codices). And I got to hear quite a few tidbits on the quiet as well - I got a heads up of the 4th ed eldar codex playtesting, the 4th ed marine codex and the tau codex of thst edition amongst others.

There were two main problems with the playtesting project which is why gw canned it in the end. The first, andmost important p, as alluded to earlier was that it leaked like a siv. Gw could not control their product, or their own information. And a lot of the leaks were quite detrimental and negative. When the fifth edition rulebook was leaked it was the final straw for them and they canned it.
The second reason was that gw saw only incedental value in playtesting. A lot of the playtesting groups were typical of gw fans everywhere - a whining complaining fractious and slightly toxic community. What gw got back in terms of comments was often best described as 'white noise' in terms of its value. The little nuggets of value were drowned out by the negativity and gw simply didn't have tge time, resources or inclination to go through it all, and in any case whatever direction they picked would be seen as 'wrong' by a large secment of the community, so they just got on with their job of making and selling models. My mate ran one of the good groups however, and while he has a good relationship with tge gw brass (even now, I think) he often found that gw was hesitant to take up feedback. One example was assault canons from space marines in the fourth ed codex. Thry reported that they should be either heavy3 and rending, or just heavy 4. Otherwise it could open up imbalances. Gw ignored them and made heavy 4 rending assault cannons and giving birth to the 'asscannon' marine builds of that generation. Probably because someone saw a way to sell all those models that could wield all those assault cannons, so retail concerns trumped game balance...

 sumi808 wrote:
It would be interesting to hear directly from former or current GW employees on this site what the view and present thinking is on the inside of the beast with all the changes in the last 5 years

My apologies if this has already been going on in this thread, i am not familiar with everyone and alot of what is written is good and from outsiders perspective (from what i can gather).

What is the view, mindset and problems diagnosis from GW employees or former employees?

How do employees or former employees interpret the financial releases or figures the past 5 years in the face of overall model gaming market growth?

Whats the view from the other side of the fence?

We don't often hear from current GW employees, at least not those who state that's what they are. This is, at least in part, because GW 'encourage' their staff not to participate in online forums.

Read into that what you will.

 sumi808 wrote:
It would be interesting to hear directly from former or current GW employees on this site what the view and present thinking is on the inside of the beast with all the changes in the last 5 years

My apologies if this has already been going on in this thread, i am not familiar with everyone and alot of what is written is good and from outsiders perspective (from what i can gather).

What is the view, mindset and problems diagnosis from GW employees or former employees?

How do employees or former employees interpret the financial releases or figures the past 5 years in the face of overall model gaming market growth?

Whats the view from the other side of the fence?

I PMed this to deadnight earlier, I think it's quite relevant to what you are asking about. In summary, there's too much of a division between the hobby people and the business people, and Pete Haines' statement seems to agree with it:

Enigwolf wrote:For the most part, it seems that GW is pretty split between the "hobby guys" (sculptors, designers, etc.) and the "business guys" (regional sales directors, store managers, etc.). From talking to them, both heads have no clue what the other is doing, really, which I've always found ironic given that the aquila is a double-headed eagle. Hahaha. As someone pointed out recently in one of the threads, its such a niche market that most of the hobby guys would rather not rock the boat [Ed: lest they have to find a new job in a competitive job market]. It seems that they get tasked to do their regular stuff, and then in their own free time come up with their own things (evidenced in Jes Goodwin's book of his old sketches that never made it into models). Every time I've spoken to a "hobby guy", the enthusiasm and care they ooze for the hobby is so at odds with the way GW is handled as a business, and in fact, they're so openly able to talk about the things they're working on. i.e. Phil Kelly mentioned in '12 to me that he would love to have written a full Guard 'dex, but instead only managed to get a small hand in the then-upcoming Astra Militarum one. This latter statement implies to me that the whole design team now works on each 'dex, and the removal of the 'dex author's name from the inside cover page of each 'dex isn't just to hide the identity of the author, but really signals an internal reorganization in the process of how the 'dexes are written.

Deadnight wrote:

From a post by pete haines from a while back on the interwebs. It gives an interesting insight into the company and the thoughts of one of tge main designers from a few years ago. Still annoyed with his 3.5chaos codex, but by all accounts he had a very professional attitude towards project management and was apparently a swell guy. :

It has been over 5 years since me and the studio parted ways. It came as a bit of a surprise to me when a colleague at my current company told me that I had come in for a kicking on-line. Frankly when I left GW I wanted as much seperation as possible so I did not make any effort to keep up to date. Now, with a lot more water under the bridge and an approaching bit of christmas induced nostalgia I decided to at least post something.

As I have no personal agenda any more - I am not even a GW hobbyist these days - what follows is as near the truth as I can remember.

The reason I left GW is that I was made redundant. At the time I was told that as the strategy was to recycle rather than create new material then senior developers were not needed. My feeling was that outrageous claims had been made commercially that the passing of the LOTR movies would not affect the growth of sales. When this was proved as ridiculous an assertion as everyone might have guessed the share price fell. GW's customary response to falling share price was always to cut headcount. For every developer in the studio there are 1000 fans willing to do the job for less money so they can do this with impunity. I was actually quite ambivalent about it. On one level I knew what I was getting into when I joined GW - they were a hire and fire company with job security being the private preserve of those above a glass ceiling in the company. As joining the company was analagous to a mid life crisis (some people buy high powerered motorbikes and crash them, some people run off with unsuitable blondes, I ran off and joined the circus) then I didn't really give it that much advanced thought.

The main thing that studio outsiders need to understand is that the games developers in the studio are small fish with negligible say. They may get their faces in WD a lot but that is pure marketing. Worse, the fact that it happens makes doing the job harder because being in the public eye attracts the bitter jealousy of many managers. Thus the developer is in a position with no authority, taking lumps for projects that they are not responsible for scoping and subject to summary dismissal so a suit can show how big his balls are. It's not great, mostly you can focus beyond it because you are working with your hobby and that is a bit like the key to the sweet shop but I always felt uneasy there.

For myself, I was always torn between trying to make 40K a role playing wargame where lists encouraged outrageous conversions forming part of highly personalised armies and, on the other hand, a competitive game that had to be properly balanced. As the Index Astartes series had already begun doing rules for chaos chapters when I started then I pursued the role playing approach for the chaos codex. In retrospect I should have thought it through more but I was still primarily an enthusiast at that time so it was easy to get carried away and I had found the previous (Jervis) codex to be bland to the point of tedium. The problem was always going to be that an ideal codex had 15 to 25 product codes. By the time Index Astartes had run its course the chaos codex would have needed two to three times that many. I really tried to keep as many of the options as I could because that was what I beleived people wanted. The end result was unbalanced but then with so much variation possible it was kind of inevitable. Al I can say to the people who have piled into me for it is sorry, I was actually trying to be true to the enthusiasts, rather than the bean counters. Later I managed to achieve something similar with traits etc without the balance issues but thats life.

Anyway I am now back working in IT and look back on my GW time fondly despite the constant worry and stress that came with it. I still have my armies but have returned to my original interest - playing historical ancients - and am thoroughly enjoying it.
So - to the people who have said courteous things, cheers, to the rest, well, if your world view is such that you spew vitriol at people for what they do in the context of a game of toy soldiers then you really ought to get out more. There are many things in the world worthy of opposing far more than a bit of codex creep.

That was interesting to read, albeit not in the least bit surprising. Cheers for posting it.

All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

According to who?

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

This is literally the exact opposite of about 90% of what I've read and every single person I've personally spoken to.

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

Very unlikely for multiple reasons.

Firstly, the rules are available for free. Consequently, there will be no purchasing of $80USD rule books or $50USD army books. While it is nice for the player that these are free, there will obviously be no increase in revenue due to purchases of rule books.

Secondly, there is no associated release of new models to go with the release of AoS. When LotR was released by GW, there were multiple brand new lines of miniatures, and those miniatures were in a slightly different scale than their previous lines, making them more attractive to a different set of consumers. With the current AoS merely using already existing miniatures, there will not be a large influx of new customers who need to buy models to play. It's a safe wager that the majority, if not the vast majority, of people interested in playing AoS already own every model they would need in order to play. Of course, there will be some influx of newer players with the reduced barrier of entry from the financial side. However, without the release of a new line of models, there will most likely not be any sort of significant increase in revenue derived from existing GW customers.

Lastly, LotR's early success is largely attributed to the association with the movies of the same name. Those movies functioned as a sort of de facto marketing for the game, even though GW didn't do a tremendous amount of their own marketing of the game. There is no such mass-market appeal piece of pop culture with which to associate the AoS release. Just like most other GW games, the vast majority of people will have no knowledge whatsoever about the game. Conversely, people who had never even heard of table top wargames had heard of Lord of the Rings by association with the movies.

Those three reasons combined prompt me to believe that AoS will have a negligible impact upon the revenue of GW as a whole.

At the store I went to, one person bought the set. A lot of people were watching as he unboxed it, he was cool enough to let willing people assemble some models on place and they even started painting them together. All the white dwarves sold out too because of the miniature. Apart from that - nothing. Noone was even remotely interested in AoS. Everyone kept wondering on how will they be able to play using their armies and whether they should keep using the old rules or not.

Every friend who was into Warhammer is confused and approach AoS with huge reserve.

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

Assuming it does it will not be until next year.

AOS won't be bringing in the outsiders like LOTR did, either.
Someone walks into a store. Sees the AOS box for $125, the Infinity for $120, the WMH for $99, etc. There's a lot of competition and nothing in the fluff (ala LOTR) to bring people to it more than the others.

Also, rules free, so no income from that. No massive new armies to buy. Many veterans turned off, etc.

No, I don't see AOS as the savior of GW.

If by popular you mean 'Would rather step in dog doo', then, yes, it is pretty darned popular....

The Auld Grump - but it is above 'Poking my eye out with a sharp stick'.

Some of the small investors, don't seem impressed.
http://www.lse.co.uk/ShareChat.asp?page=1&ShareTicker=GAW

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

As someone who worked in a GW during that 'bump', I will say.. not a chance in hell !

 Pacific wrote:

Knockagh wrote:
All this aside folks. AoS seems to be pretty flippin popular and could put a good LOTR size bump on the balance sheet.

As someone who worked in a GW during that 'bump', I will say.. not a chance in hell !

Unless AoS is being stocked in bookstores and other places like the original LotR games were 15 years ago, then I don't see too many outsiders finding out about it to make a bump.

Plus serialised in a magazine and consequently advertised in TV.

I hear they even made a film about it too.

Not just one, it was a series of three!!

Back on topic, LoTR added about £50 million in annual sales to GW for several years, that is why it was such a shock to them when it collapsed.

There is no way that a single boxed game costing £75 is going to sell that many copies. They would need to sell well over 600,000 boxes. It ain't happening. It could easily sell 100,000 boxes, I reckon. There clearly is a market for a simple, easy to pick up fantasy game. There has been a lot of positive reaction as well as negative.

What is important for GW is to establish AOS as the go to Fantasy wargame for a significant number of people, and manage to sell them lots more models.

It is clear that a lot of veteran Fantasy players already loathe AOS for pretty obvious reasons. But, as said above, the rules and scrolls are free, so the money has to come from selling kits. That sword cuts two ways. Even if Fantasy vets jump ship to Kings Of War, they may continue to buy GW kits if the models are impressive. Not playing AOS won't matter because the rules are free anyway, so no lost revenue for not playing it.

AOS has a better chance to catch on with newcomers and figure collectors (super fans) who aren't looking for an in-depth ruleset.

As things go on, there may be a chance of issuing compendia, fluff books, limited edition expansions and so on, that will generate some useful sales.

I'm not sure people will continue to buy the kits, at least not in the volumes that GW want though. The scale difference is way more out of whack - when you compare one of those Sigmarines next to a Space Marine, the difference is palpable. There is no way the new GW stuff is going to scale in any shape or form with existing 28mm Fantasy kits from other ranges so if you want to buy the GW stuff, you are committing to buying your whole army from GW. I assume that is a deliberate decision on their part to ensure their stuff is scaled sufficiently that it isn't interchangeable with other ranges but the door swings both ways; people might just as well decide to get their kits from other ranges, even more so if they are getting their rules from other sources too.

Deadnight wrote:
What gw got back in terms of comments was often best described as 'white noise' in terms of its value. The little nuggets of value were drowned out by the negativity and gw simply didn't have tge time, resources or inclination to go through it all, and in any case whatever direction they picked would be seen as 'wrong' by a large secment of the community, so they just got on with their job of making and selling models.

Then they were doing it wrong.

 filbert wrote:
I'm not sure people will continue to buy the kits, at least not in the volumes that GW want though. The scale difference is way more out of whack - when you compare one of those Sigmarines next to a Space Marine, the difference is palpable. There is no way the new GW stuff is going to scale in any shape or form with existing 28mm Fantasy kits from other ranges so if you want to buy the GW stuff, you are committing to buying your whole army from GW. I assume that is a deliberate decision on their part to ensure their stuff is scaled sufficiently that it isn't interchangeable with other ranges but the door swings both ways; people might just as well decide to get their kits from other ranges, even more so if they are getting their rules from other sources too.

The Sigmarites are supposed to be bigger superhumans, though. Frankly, I think they're the size that Space Marines SHOULD be, and if GW rescaled Marines to that size, I'd remodel every one of mine without a second thought. (and I own a LOT of space marines). It remains to be seen how the chaos guys (Blood warriors?) are sized; as they look more like they should be cultist-sized (ie regular humans).

I'm sure I have seen a scale picture, although for the life of me I can't find where, that showed the chaos guys as being Space Marine size, so again, completely out of whack with what they should be.

 loki old fart wrote:
Some of the small investors, don't seem impressed.
http://www.lse.co.uk/ShareChat.asp?page=1&ShareTicker=GAW

If by "some", you mean "one", who owns an "admittedly tiny" number of shares, that would be right. There haven't even been any other posts about GAW for like, 3+ months.

 filbert wrote:
I'm sue I have seen a scale picture, although for the life of me I can't find where, that showed the chaos guys as being Space Marine size, so again, completely out of whack with what they should be.

 filbert wrote:
I'm sue I have seen a scale picture, although for the life of me I can't find where, that showed the chaos guys as being Space Marine size, so again, completely out of whack with what they should be.

We'll see the actual models in just a couple of days!

Re -- picture above -- the chaos guy there looks like the "CSM equivalent" model (look at the base size, it's 32mm). I meant the "chaos cultist equivalent", which should be on a 25mm base. The Sigmarite is on a 50mm base.

Actually, the Chaos guy above would be pretty good to use for CSM!

Tyron - that's the one - just found it myself on Google too. If I am not mistaken, the third guy along is one of the Chaos guys from the AoS boxed set right?

 filbert wrote:
Tyron - that's the one - just found it myself on Google too. If I am not mistaken, the third guy along is one of the Chaos guys from the AoS boxed set right?

No problem He is from the set.

So what are we saying then? That all the human miniatures from AoS are Andre the Giant? Or rather that this game clearly isn't 28mm scale any more and won't mesh well with either other 28mm ranges or in fact, with existing WHFB ranges because the elephantiasis will be apparent even compared to GW 'heroic' 28mm of the past. I think it's clear from the picture that we are talking an almost entirely new level of scale creep here.

I have been saying for years that GW's super secret technology for cramming all that wonderful detail into a 28mm figure is to make it 32mm instead. Now they are just going to make them 35mm.

If adding the new figures would invalidate all your existing WHFB armies you will just have to buy new AOS armies.

To be fair, though, the Sigmarites are Land Marines, so naturally they are taller than normal humans.

 Talys wrote:
Re -- picture above -- the chaos guy there looks like the "CSM equivalent" model (look at the base size, it's 32mm). I meant the "chaos cultist equivalent", which should be on a 25mm base. The Sigmarite is on a 50mm base.

No, that guy is the cultist equivalent... Note the lack of armour. That's supposed to be a regular sized human.

The Chaos Warriors are even bigger.